Art Fag City at the L Magazine: Gallery Girls is Terrible, and That’s Amazing

After watching the first episode of “Gallery Girls,” I can promise you that Bravo’s kept up its end on vile programming. You’ll love it. Here’s an excerpt of my review at the L Magazine:

As Blake Gopnik pointed out at The Daily Beast, the show isn’t in any real sense about the art world. The galleries involved are marginal, the art is largely offscreen, and the girls spend more time talking about fashion than art. To anyone familiar with the industry, there are little absurdities sprinkled throughout. When the Brooklynites close their struggling fashion-art hybrid space for the night and head out to an opening at Eli Klein’s SoHo white cube, for example, they receive a warm welcome and an invitation to the post-opening dinner. In the real world, they’d have stood around awkwardly and quietly left when the wine ran out.

Of course, any interaction between these characters would need to be manufactured: the art world’s cliques and caste systems are quietly self-enforced, and open conflict is an unseemly rarity. Gallery Girls, then, is something like ancient armies sending out champions to decide a battle in single combat: rather than involve real people with real careers in such a grisly class war, we send out somebody expendable and watch from the sidelines. The ensuing bloodbath is excellent entertainment.